programming language

noun

plural programming languages

: any of various languages (see language sense 1c) used to create computer programs

Programming languages are the foundation of software development, allowing developers to create applications, websites, and systems through computer-understandable instructions.

—geeksforgeeks.org

Most software engineers do far more than churn out code, designing products, choosing programming languages, troubleshooting problems and gathering feedback from users.

—Steve Lohr

Maintaining the system is getting harder because it relies on a computer programming language (COBOL) that fewer and fewer programmers know.

—David Zubler

compare assembly language, machine language, natural language sense 2

Examples of programming language in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Often these results have been accompanied by formal proofs, which rely on the programming language Lean to establish, with airtight certainty, that a statement must be true. — Konstantin Kakaes, Quanta Magazine, 8 Sep. 2026

Buckmaster and Alpöge were able to verify that the proof was correct using the programming language Lean, but the English-language explanation the LLMs produced was barely readable, according to Buckmaster. — Joseph Howlett, Scientific American, 8 Sep. 2026

The company fully open-sourced its Mojo programming language and compiler, addressing concerns about platform neutrality. — Patrick Moorhead, Forbes.com, 20 Aug. 2026

These systems—such as Isabelle, Lean, and Rocq—are specialized programming languages that check mathematical proofs step-by-step, verifying their logical correctness. — Benjamin Skuse, IEEE Spectrum, 25 June 2026

Word History

First Known Use

1959, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for programming language

• interlanguage
• metalanguage